Training Analyst and Supervisor, British Association of Psychotherapists

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I have always been more interested in practical application than theoretical speculation: for instance since school days, because of their experiential emphasis, I had been more drawn towards the monastic and mystical religious traditions than to academic philosophy. Subsequently I embarked on a Ph.D. on S.T. Coleridge and his attempt to set a poetic pantheism, laced with Germanic transcendental philosophy, within the pragmatic constraints of anglicanism. My parallel interest at the time in C.G. Jung, particularly his creation of an environment and lifestyle at Bollingen that reflected his belief system, seemed a natural extension of that orientation.

Of the many papers encountered in the course of my training at the SAP the one that made the deepest impression of me, although at the time I could hardly explain why, was Roger Money-Kyrle’s ‘The aims of psychoanalysis’. This short paper, which has something of the resonance of the King James Bible, became a lodestar leading me on to explore Rosenfeld, Bion, and perhaps particularly Meltzer. So some time later when I first came across Ron Britton – with his gift for both drawing on and illuminating his literary sources – I already felt comfortable with his neo-Kleinian orientation.

What I have particularly valued about the SAP, perhaps because of its roots in Fordham’s close collaboration with both Winnicott and Meltzer, is the generous breadth of its outlook. I have felt my Kleinian interests have been welcomed as part of the rich tapestry of possibility and this has allowed an exploration in my recent papers of a perspective on Jung that attempts to develop the critiques of Winnicott and Satinover. My hope is that an empathic understanding of the wounded aspects of the ‘wounded healer’ that was Jung can help us all catch up with our own shadows: it has certainly confirmed my appreciation of my Jungian identity.

Concomitantly the biggest shift in my clinical practice has been a developing appreciation of the value of picking up the myriad subtle obstructions and evasions that pre-empt analytic evolution and block access to the teleological resources of the psyche that Jung so prized.

As I have a particular interest in the difficulties besetting training analyses it will be no surprise that my core aspiration for the Journal is that it should continue to develop its reputation as the foremost clinical publication of the Jungian world.